And speaking of YouTube, I have a new article up on the SuicideGirls safe-for-work blog. It's called Win a Date With Brad Warner and it is possibly the single most embarrassing thing I have ever made public. I'm sure I will deeply regret having ever typed this up. Ah well. (The YouTube connection will become clear if you read the article.)

(And remember I'm not getting paid for any of these funtastic pieces of entertainment you're enjoying except for what I can get form people clicking on the little donation button over there to your left. Those reading on Facebook can click on the words donation button.)

And finally, people have been sending me all kinds of things where legitimate respected people in the Buddhist world have made fun of Genpo Roshi.

Finally, here's one that appears to have been written by somebody with inside knowledge of what went on backstage in the Genpo Roshi camp. Also pretty funny.

Some might feel it's cruel to make fun of poor old Genpo now that he's sunk so low he can only charge $15,000 per person for his Big Mind™ retreats, down from the $50,000 per person he was getting just two years ago. All that "sadness and love" he's feeling these days must really be getting him down as he plods through one of his three houses, using his cut-up Buddhist robes for hankies as tears stream from his eyes.

But I feel like making fun of Genpo Roshi is the kindest thing the Buddhist community can do for him right now. Those who are enabling him to continue with his deceptive ways are not doing the man any favors at all. As others have pointed out, Genpo is a big source of income for the groups he leads and they don't want to lose their cash cow. Those kinds of friends are not your friends at all.

These articles will also stick with people much more than any well-worded open letter to some Buddhist organization ever could. Poor Genpo may even have to reduce his fees to $10,000 per person before the year is out!

"Buddhist writings have shown clearly that even Buddha himself never claimed to have gone beyond desire...New desires always appear and they always seem just as urgent as the ones we’ve just satisfied. That’s the nature of the human mind.

True happiness, he said, was to be found in accepting our dissatisfaction with life and learning, ironically, to be satisfied with dissatisfaction." (apologies for the snip; read the article, folks)

You're gonna have a hard job convincing (what Harry likes to call) the Buddhismists of that - you, Dogen Sangha types and Stephen Batchelor. But please do keep plugging it.

Far as pulling chicks goes - just hang on another decade or so and, if you're lucky, biology along with sundry other causes and conditions will knock that silly idea out of your head.

It will be interesting to see what your plea on SG will net in the way of responses--let us know.

If it were that easy, I think it would be a common practice already.

Maybe you need to be more specific about what you are seeking...You know the kind of questions asked on dating services

Polyamorous? Spike heels in the groin and granola and veggie burgers after? Love of punk rock a must?I am sure there is a special set and subset of gals out thereNow the question is the set you fall into for females seeking a male(s)There may be things about yourself needing to be tweaked--maybe you need some tats, a mustache, play a different genre of music (metal or country metal--kettle)maybe you need to pump some iron and beef up a little

Find out what the girls you would like to be liking you like and give them that

lone Ranger said: "Brad how do you know or come to the opinion that prior to the 20th century people probably couldn't understand Dogen?"

It's my guess based on how long it took for any printed edition of the book to come out. I believe the first one was 400 odd years after Dogen wrote it. But only a few copies were made. The first mass-produced edition came out in the 1800s. But it was only in the 20th century that Dogen's works became popular.

However, all this time the Soto organization, that Dogen founded in Japan, flourished. So it wasn't as if nobody realized the guy wrote stuff. They just didn't care to read it.

Hmmmn. I get (got) your point about Dogen, Brad, I (wrongly) assumed you would take umbrage with Anonymous at 4:21 PM who advised you grow a mustache on top of your mustache (or failed to notice you already had one...you do, right?).

yeah, Like mysterion said, books and the ability to read them were not yet part of that world. It still happens. But no doubt Dogen was filtered back to the Japanese type Chico State equivalent misfits. Mostly it was misunderstood.

I have no idea how Big Mind 'works', hazily remember its claims (which I read secondhand on XcoreZen), and have a completely biased, Brad Warner fostered perception of it.

That said, my unqualified image of how it works is that Genpo excites Monkey Mind, does some mind fucks a la "Man Gong's Net", repeats, turns people into Sun Wu Kong clones,then excites them into arousal until Buddha's Cosmic palm, whose grasp they have learned is inescapable, finally produces a Cosmic Orgasm.

Go to the same haunts often enough to become 'known'Widen circle of interests--find others also interested in same

Rather than caring about find whom and what I care forDitto for revers--not those who care about me so much as who are those who care for mesimplistic as it may sound caring about each other is nice and civilized and friendly and allcaring for each other is relationship of the going the distance variety

It's so much easier to dwell on, and speak loudly about, the failings of others than to dwell on and speak loudly and talk about our own failings.

Why is that?

Without getting too gung-ho and idealistic about it all; I think there is a clear and real definition to be recognised between wallowing in our own sweet swaddling shit in regards to our perceptions of big, bad others ('boo! Hiss!' 'Ha ha, aren't I great in comparison...!' etc), and what the Big Boys and Girls call 'adult practice'.

Genpo has, of course, acted like a quality asshole by all accounts, but just exactly what are we ourselves doing with that information???

The failures to observe directly how this 'fundamental point' is becoming manifest seem pretty widespread among the hecklers... not all of 'em, but most.

I can see what Jundo and Brad are doing regarding the Genpo debacle. It's obvious in their words that they think they have it all sussed, but they haven't passed the nappy stage on this one. Can you see it? Can they?

;-)

At a lecture I was at last night our psychology leacturer said an interesting thing (we were talking about psychopathy): He said that it would be better for people who are really interested in helping people with potentially dangerous mental disorders to consider just what it would take for them to act like that, to act like psychopaths or whatever. The thinking that they are just 'evil' or 'sickos' that is so well promoted by the hecklers within certain sections of the media is really not very far off the assumption that they are 'possesed by demons' or are something 'other than' humans. 'They' are more like us than we may care to admit.

...in other words, if we considered the Genpo debacle in 'taking a backwards step, turning the light and reflecting' as opposed 'pushing forward and seeking to outshine', what might we learn about anything fundamental?

And for the hecklers who will want me to just fall in line believe shit: yes, he did bad, terrible person, awful shame, I'm disgusted, angry and think he should be disrobed etc etc etc... and all the stuff that goes without saying.

Gniz... I decided not to say what you just said, even though I was thinking pretty much the same thing. I had warring impulses to be positive about this stuff and impulses to be negative about it. I figured I would go with the positive ones just this once. But I had another essay prepared that said kind of what you just did.

And Anon 7:13 AM, I have to agree that I couldn't really comprehend what the reference to me at the end of Jundo's piece had to do with anything.

Harry, I have a lot of thoughts about what it would take for me to do something psychopathic. In fact this has been a huge part of my practice.

I have often made reference to this, but I tend to do so obliquely. I have written, for example, that Zen practice may reveal to a person that he has some of the worst impulses a human could possibly imagine.

I wrote this because I have seen in my own practice that I, Brad Warner, Mr. Nice Guy If There Ever Was One, contains some absolutely horrific desires. So horrific that I refuse to commit them to writing.

When these first made themselves known to me, I suspected that I was a psychopath. I considered turning myself in to the authorities or even killing myself lest these impulses run rampant.

Then I realized that I always had a choice. Just because an impulse or desire existed did not mean I had to fulfill it. I saw that the problem wasn't so much the desires. The problem was that something inside me that said, "You must fulfill this desire in order to be you."

Furthermore, I feel that every single one of us has similar desires. We just suppress them so effectively that we can deny their existence altogether. That's one way to deal with them. But I think it's not the best way. The best way is to acknowledge them (at least to yourself, if not to anyone else) and see that you can live a happy life without ever fulfilling them.

Having your cake and eating it too seems fundamental to Zen. Very little is as satisfying as standing above the fray and tsk-tsking people who have sunk so low as to actually call out a fellow practitioner for being an obvious sleaze-ball. Better to reprove the people who dare to point this out. Dude can have blood on his hands and people will still make it about themselves. But a lot of people get hurt long after everyone and their cousin have found out the real score. Maybe that's why things are so agonizingly slow to get corrected in Buddhism.

I wrote this because I have seen in my own practice that I, Brad Warner, Mr. Nice Guy If There Ever Was One, contains some absolutely horrific desires. So horrific that I refuse to commit them to writing.

Yep.

I wonder if that's only true of the hateful, deluded fucked-up beasts among us...like me. Or whether everybody's got it going on, somewhere? My guess is that some people are a lot more horrific than others. That's clear, I guess, when we see what some people can actually do when they act out their imagined horrors.

So this makes sense;

"The best way is to acknowledge them (at least to yourself, if not to anyone else) and see that you can live a happy life without ever fulfilling them."

And perhaps therapy, if it bothers you...along with the zazen?

And BTW, Zen Forum International is pissing me off at the moment. I got more active on it recently (as "jiblet")- largely due to the lack of anything much of interest to me happening here recently. It's a moderated place, so you gotta be careful, but I've had some good chats with some good people there. But I've managed to infringe the Terms of Service 3 or 4 times during the last few weeks - for very minor, accidental infringements, you understand - and the latest got me WARNED.

I mean, I know I'm a dick, but I do try hard to be honest, accurate and non-abusive. Not enough, it seems to avoid incurring penalty points at ZFI.

What's all that about? What are some of the most articulate, allegedly dedicated Zen/Buddhist practitioners appearing on our interwebs scared of? I thought they'd learnt the lesson of E-Sangha. I really don't get it.

anon #108 wrote: I mean, I know I'm a dick, but I do try hard to be honest, accurate and non-abusive. Not enough, it seems to avoid incurring penalty points at ZFI.

What's all that about? What are some of the most articulate, allegedly dedicated Zen/Buddhist practitioners appearing on our interwebs scared of? I thought they'd learnt the lesson of E-Sangha. I really don't get it.

It's the Western Buddhist disease. Thanks to DT Suzuki and David Carradine, and the ideas they spread, two or three generations of America's Top Douchebags were attracted to Buddhism. You won't find a higher concentration of militantly politically correct self-obsessed arrogant douchebags outside of a gathering of Western Buddhists.

Ironically, the douchebags are generally mixed in with some of the nicest, coolest people you'll find anywhere. Unfortunately, the douches are the who ones tend to seek positions of authority. That's true of most organizations, though, religious or otherwise.

Gniz Wrote:People's continued blindness, repeating the same cycles over and over again--that's what I find rather disheartening.

Gniz, that's what compassion is all about - the attitude towards another's blindness. It's not their fault. I mean, they are not consciously intending to be blind. Suffering is rooted in 'not realizing' etc.

When you find yourself upset with someone else for not seeing things clearly, that can often be a projection of how you unconsciously relate to yourself. (I'm speaking from personal experience.) More compassion for our own blindness. Our thinking planning intellect doesn't get it right all the time. That's a fact. What happens when we make mistakes? How did our parents help us to understand and accept that making mistakes does happen. Did they help us in that way?

How do we relate to the times when we make big mistakes? How do we feel about others when they make mistakes?

"When you find yourself upset with someone else for not seeing things clearly, that can often be a projection of how you unconsciously relate to yourself."

Agreed. At the same time, I struggle to find the balance in not simply letting others--and myself--completely off the hook just because it wasn't "conscious" or "intentional."

As Brad would say, we usually know right and wrong even when we pretend not to.

This is real stuff, and its something I'm dealing with in my personal life to some extent, around an issue with my family and some nastiness that went on. How to react and process these kinds of things are tricky and there's no right answer, just lots of questions and sadness.

I have found that it takes courage for the noise of pain and anger the embroilments of actions and reactions to become sadness.

The questions change with acceptance, and the sadness widens and deepens.

Taking responsibility for the consequences becomes response-ability. I like respondablity - widening and deepening. Its remit widening and deepening.

Over time in this way, I've noticed the rest of me start to catch up with the bit that got scraped and exposed - which seemed to see more acutely, before more clearly.

That 'over-time' time is made up of little times of it, I find.

I like this from Huineng:

What is impermanent is the buddha-nature, what is permanent is the discriminatory mind with all sorts of good and bad states...

...Don't you realise? If the buddha-nature were permanent, then what good or bad states would there be to speak of? There would never ever be anyone aspiring to enlightenment. That is why I say it is impermanent; this is precisely the path of true permanence spoken of by the Buddha. Furthermore, if all things were impermanent, then everything would have its own nature, subject to birth and death, while true eternal essence would not be universal. Therefore I say things are permanent; this is precisely the meaning of impermanence spoken of by the Buddha.

mysterion: Thanks for explaining Brad's motivation to him. But to me, it seemed like Brad was astonished by Genpo's material excesses but not particularly troubled by them. His main problem was with the method being confused with Zen, not the profits taken from the method. You might again be mixing up your own feelings with Brad's.

ZFI has already reached the level of intolerance of E-Sangha quite a while ago. Haven't you noticed who's not there anymore? The mods quickly delete anything which doesn't agree with their dogma, and any open discussion about that moderation practice is not tolerated at all. IMHO it's about time for a "ZFI Watch" website to warn unwarying newbies.

Having kicked up a fuss, I've now had my warning rescinded, so I'm feeling a little warmer and fuzzier about ZFI right now...

I don't know that ZFI is quite as bad, quite as intolerant and dogmatic as E-Sangha could be (perhaps your experience would convince me otherwise), but yes, I have noticed the absence of certain serious, sincere contributors who used to take part. I don't know if those people have chosen to leave, disillusioned, or have been banned. Either way is not good. They may, of course, have just got fed up with the whole internet talking shop thing.

Like I said up there ^, I don't get the need for super-cautious moderation at all - and I think ZFI's moderation is often super-cautious. As anon @9.35am said, there's a lot of politically correct and personally-biased disciplining and censorship that goes on under the guise of "right speech" (I'm sure the mods at ZFI will disagree, or insist that it's 'necessary'). Apart from its inherent unfairness, that can lead to a kind of dishonest self-censorship and creates more problems than it solves, IMO. Some respectful but naturally outspoken or dissenting/questioning types are prevented from saying what they want to say, how they want to say it. It also creates an "in-crowd" consensus of the well-behaved/non-dissenters, who can occasionally be seen politely rounding on dissident elements, accompanied by gasshos and namastes a-plenty. There's still a lot of interesting, amusing and honest stuff that does get said, but...there's a lot that doesn't.

Of course, you/I/we don't have to go there if we don't like it. Maybe someone over there will come over here and tell me just what I'm not getting about moderation...without fear of being moderated. I wonder if my fragile sensibilities can survive the experience?

What do Brad's Suicide Girls "Win a Date With Brad Warner" and Genpo Dennis's "Pay Big Bucks for a Date Rape With Dennis Merzel" have in common?

Have compassion for pathetic passive-aggressive loneliness and its results, brothers and sisters. The only difference is that one of these poor souls has acted on his pathology and the other has repressed it, so far; see Brad's 7:35 AM comment.

You should ask Dan Savage! I'm actually only half kidding myself. He might make a little fun of you for the whole zen thing but it might be fun to read what he's got to say (in his column).

Barring that, the main problem is probably that the girls you would most likely have a chance with-- thirties, early forties-- might dig the whole spiritual teacher/ published author thing but given that they are likely looking for a stable relationship with a person who isn't likely to go broke any moment or move to another part of the country. It sucks but most ladies don't want to date Kodo Sawaki (assuming they're not looking to "be in the presence of a master" or some such bullshit). I imagine things will pick up when you are established for a while in one place making a steady living (however that is).

I really really like the point of your SG article, though. The idea of being at peace with your disappointment is great. I hope you decide to do a full write-up of the Batchelor book sometime.

But seriously Mr. Brad,I don't think your private life will take off in the direction you might want until you are done (mostly) with the public one you now lead.That's just the sense I have of it.

In the public eye, and lonely or togetherness, in relative seclusion.

'Course things aren't so cut and dried.It's just that I don't think your public persona and public appeals will get you more than laid.And that's ok in itself in its own way.Good luck with all of it and please have fun

It sucks but most ladies don't want to date Kodo Sawaki (assuming they're not looking to "be in the presence of a master" or some such bullshit). I imagine things will pick up when you are established for a while in one place making a steady living (however that is).

I'm afraid Brad shall end up in Kodo's situation, although he'd rather not. Being a man of ethics, he won't have much choice. Besides, Even Old Gudo decided, when he became a monk, to go celibate.

Also in reference to the suicide girls article, I do think that Steve Hagen over at Dharma Field Zen center has been writing about zen minus the woo woo religious stuff for some tome. If you haven't already I would suggest reading a couple of his books especially "Buddhism: it's not what you think"

Does anything matter? I mean really, I am in some wierd flat dark-night or something stage, and I really want to know, does any of this --and anything at all --matter? Why can't I care about anything? ah I'm such a downer, sorry. Thanks guys.....